Moderator: This is the first part of a three part exchange between David Marquand and Anthony Barnett. The second part will be published tomorrow.
David Marquand (Oxford):
Dear Anthony
I've just read your ‘dream' on "What Gordon Brown should have said". I loved it.
But I think you are conceding too much to the Europhobes, in a potentially dangerous way. You seem to start from the premise that we, the British, have to decide for ourselves, and for all time, how much authority and how many competences we should transfer to Union institutions. I strongly disagree.
The EU is the descendant of the EEC, which was itself the descendant of the ECSC. From the start, the whole idea - the utterly brilliant idea, which has peacefully transformed Europe from the Dingle peninsula to the Byelorussian border - was that the Member States would join together in a union that transcended national sovereignty and that would evolve, in inherently unpredictable ways, from economic integration to political union, of a quite original kind. That vision, Monnet's vision, was quite different from the vision of the founding fathers of the United States. The US has a written constitution, in principle valid for all time, setting out the powers conceded to the centre with the rest reserved for the states. The US, you might say, is a characteristically Enlightenment modernist project. The EU is post-modern; and this is its beauty.
If today, in 2007, only 50 years after the Rome Treaty, we were to define the powers we want to transfer to Union institutions in a written constitution, we would lock ourselves in a straitjacket when what we need is the maximum possible flexibility. The one certain thing we can say about the future is that it will be different from the past (and present) - and the most probable thing is that, if Europeans are to have any hope of keeping their end up in what will, by 2050, be a multipolar world with at least three and possibly five or even six super-powers, the Union will have to be far more tightly integrated than it is now, and the central institutions will have to have more competences and more power to exercise them. I do not want my grandchildren to have to live in a world ruled by the US, China, India, Brazil and perhaps Russia (plus Ukraine and Byelorussia, most probably), in which Europe remains at its present stage of integration. And for one Member State to adopt a constitution effectively preventing further transfers from the national to the supranational level, and therefore blocking the rest from moving forward as and when the world evolves from unipolarity to multipolarity, would be outrageous. If we are so suspicious of the Union that we want now to codify and define the powers we are prepared to transfer to it, we ought to leave. And the only future outside is that we become, in effect, the 51st state of the US - only without any capacity to participate in its decision making.
This is why I'm against a referendum, by the way. It implies that the citizens of one Member State have a right to veto what the others want to do. The only referendum I'd accept would be one carried out throughout the territory of the Union.
Ever
David
Comments
"The only referendum I’d accept would be one carried out throughout the territory of the Union," writes David Marquand.
And the only referendum I'd accept would be one for which propositions and alternative popular-democratic constitutions could be drawn up by ordinary EU citizens and their grassroots organisations. We can do without referenda controlled by the political class which created that substantially democracy-free zone, the "actually existing" EU.
Surely the real issue is that the British people need institutions they can trust to govern honestly. The EU consistently proves itself corrupt and dishonest, while the British government shows it's gross incompetance in too many areas.
What we need is a dream with a plan on how to get there from a leader who can demonstrate competence and foresight and more importantly the capacity to achieve his dream.
Why not ask the 207,000 people leaving the UK each year what needs to be done? This must at least give a guide on we must do.
There are really two schools of thought. Those, like David Marquand, who appear to believe that the EU has an identity and a people that have a common sense of identity and those that believe that the EU is made up of nation states, whose people are prepared, for so long as it is in their interests to do so, to act with common purpose.
Personally, I fall into the latter; and so disagree with the sentiment contained in David Marquand's letter. We do not have to leave the EU if we do not want to proceed with further integration. The requirement for unanimity before further integration is something that is contained in the existing arrangements; that means that we can say no without compromising our membership of the existing institutions.
As to a referendum; the argument that I have with Gordon Brown is that he is the Prime Minister of a Government who promised a referendum for a treaty that was called a 'constitutional treaty' complete with red lines. He says that the reform treaty, despite having many of the same features of the 'constitutinal treaty' and complete with the same red lines as existed before (although possibly not as strongly expressed as before) does not require a referendum. He is in effect saying that if I choose my words carefully enough, I can renege on any promise I made in the last general election.
Gareth Young (Brighton): It’s up to the British people to cede sovereignty, not for the EU as a whole to over-ride the wishes of sovereign nations."
What a stupid response!
The point (which the respondent has deliberately misrepresented) is that it isn't the EU who will be overriding anything. It will be European citizens; surely you remember that democracy thing everyone keeps talking about?
Detractors constantly refer to the lack of European demos but such sentiment does not emerge overnight, it develops over a period of many years.
Allowing European citizens to express a collective opinion upon a document with European resonance is precisely the right kind of democratic vehicle to kick start this long-term process.
Groups implacably opposed to the emergence of any hint European political sentiment are very careful to hide the real purpose of their strategies, which is to strangle at birth any such process. A self-fulfilling prophecy?
I recall attending a conference in May 2004 held just prior to Tony Blair's conceding of a referendum on the original Constitutional Treaty. A spokesman for the group leading the campaign for a referendum (because they wanted to veto the Treaty) was asked a specific question in relation to elements of the United Kingdom. Apparently it was perfectly acceptable for Wales, Scotland, N.Ireland and other English Regions to vote yes but have to abide by an overall No vote across the UK. They would just have to accept the democratic will of the UK electorate;, yet the exact same principle doesn't apply to a pan-European vote?
Just another example of making the rules up to suit your argument?
What a stupid letter.
Parliament cannot bind its successors. It's up the the British people to cede sovereignty, not for the EU as a whole to over-ride the wishes of sovereign nations.
So far we've never been offered a referendum on whether we want to cede sovereignty, for one very good reason.
I vehemently disagree with David Marquand's suggestion of an EU-wide referendum on the Reform Treaty. This would be a typical career politician's trick to engineer a result that you want while trying to endow it with spurious democratic legitimacy. A referendum of this sort would involve conceding the principle that there is such a thing as the 'people of Europe' who had the sovereign power to take such a decision about their constitutional arrangements. To adapt David Marquand's words in the final part of this exchange, how can there be Europe-wide democracy without a European demos? At least, by implication, a referendum of this sort would involve recognising that the Reform Treaty is a constitution in all but name.
The words that Anthony Barnett puts into Gordon Brown's mouth denying that the Treaty is the same as the rejected constitution are at least authentic, in that this is the kind of lie we've been subjected to by the prime minister. The principal architect of the constitution, Giscard d'Estaing, has of course recently been on record to say that the two documents are substantially identical.
I agree with one thing Anthony Barnett said in his openDemocracy dream piece, though. In the absence of a written constitution for the UK, we are precariously dependent on the EU's role in shaping our constitutional arrangements by default. This means that, ironically, Brown's red lines are serving as a de facto guarantee that the UK parliament will still have any real UK-wide powers at all once the Treaty is ratified: the red lines almost exactly map on to the retained UK-wide powers of the government. If these were ceded in any substantial way to Europe, all that would be left of UK government would effectively be an English government.
David Marquand is therefore right to say that the two big constitutional questions are the English Question and the Europe Question. The 'thin red line' of the British state is getting increasingly difficult to hold.
David aka Britologywatch
Thanks for this response David. I think the lack of comments on the exchange with Marquand is a disappointment. We are are looking at what is going wrong with the UK from within. His approach allows us to take a look from without and see the picture more clearly.
Anthony
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